Last week I was looking at the Tree Folks' website. They are a local group that provides trees for planting in both public and private places along with tools, training, educational materials and planting supervision.

So today I went to the City of Austin Development One-Stop Shop to see about getting a permit for a storage container. The guy I talked to had some copies of a beautiful planting guide called Native and Adapted Landscape Plants -- an earthwise guide for Central Texas on his desk. It turned out that they were give-aways. We started talking about plants and trees and after a bit, he pulled out a copy of the tree poster that I wanted and gave it to me. He said they didn't have many copies, so they tried to make sure that the people who got them would actually use them. He said that I "merited" one.

I am very happy with my new tree poster and my new book...and I found out that the permit for the storage container would not be prohibitively expensive.